“She said she usually cried at least once each day
not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful and life was so
short.” – the StoryPeople/Brian Andreas
There’s a
melancholy which, for me, always follows Christmas. It’s such a poignant pleasure
to decorate the house, wrap the presents, prepare the food, set the table and
then take a moment, rocking by the Christmas tree, to savor the anticipation of
the arrival of the actual holiday and my most loved ones. Next comes the
pleasure of the time together – the laughter and love and blessed plenty,
celebrated in the cheery glow of the candlelight and Christmas lights.
As we unwrap presents,
we wax poetic, thankful by the fire…Then come the sweet Christmas Eve “Goodnights”
and happy, groggy Christmas Day “Good mornings.” How I love the simple pleasure
of sharing coffee with Mr. Clark and our grown children, together at the table,
in the morning…A bit of breakfast and then they’re gone, off to the things that
come next in their busy holidays.
My children have
in-laws and friends and pets at home that need feeding, plus a myriad of other valid
things that take them from my life before I’m ready to let them go. I get that;
it is what it is – a blessed reality where they have full lives that I get to share
only at times. Somehow, I never get quite enough time with them, though; it’s
been that way since they left for college nearly 15 years ago, that feeling of
never quite enough time.
I’ve always
envied families who live in one town and see or talk to each other every day. I
and mine have never had that…Maybe it’s something that comes with being from
the West – my people left those towns where everyone stays close and ventured out
to where the wind blows loud and cold and the nearest neighbor is miles
away…Maybe it’s something that stays in our blood even after the suburbs have
replaced the farmsteads and there’s little adventure left in our hearts. Our
extended families live far away from us and each other; we are islands that
make weekly, monthly, maybe only on a holiday calls…How nice it must be to have
everyone together for every Sunday dinner, the way so many folks do, here in
the South.
But, back to my post-Christmas
melancholy…Some years she has me pack the decorations away slowly, leave the
lights up way too long and savor the season until nearly Valentine’s Day. Other
years, I start repacking the plastic bins marked “Christmas” on December 26. This
is one of those years – most of Christmas has been put away and it’s only New
Year’s Day…Like William Styron’s Black Dog of Depression, I can’t predict or
judge what post-Christmas melancholy will have me do, I just follow her lead,
knowing that if I do, my life will become my own again, sooner rather than
later.
Enter
the 2014 datebook-day planner/Ipad-smart phone e-calendar/etc. – this is where
optimism reappears. There’s something so hopeful about
all those blank calendar pages stretching into the year ahead and something so
cleansing about throwing all of those old calendar pages away.
I take a moment to be thankful for all the good things that
happened during the last year, lick my wounds over the bad things that also occurred,
then move on, filling in the birthdays and anniversaries and already known
plans for the New Year. I’m not an optimistic person – every glass is
half-empty, every silver cloud has a dark lining, disaster in one form or
another lurks around every corner…So, you see why this ritual of sitting down and
savoring a fresh calendar is special to me. It’s a fleeting and precious time of
optimism in my otherwise pessimistic year.
A particularly optimistic friend proclaimed “We choose Hope!”
in her Christmas letter this year – multiple exclamation marks, “Hope!” always
capitalized - several times in each paragraph. The tone of her letter was no
surprise, but, something in her message stuck. “Hope!” is a choice we can all make.
“Hope!” can replace fear or dread as our anchoring emotion…Imagine that,
post-Christmas melancholy and Styron’s Black Dog…
It’ll be mid-January before my emotions settle down again…In
the interim and thereafter, I hope I choose “Hope!” again and again…Even that Black
Dog can thump his tail at times.
(The Black Dog in the photo is Roland, my beloved, old, rescue of a Rottweiller. He chose "Hope!" and thumped his little stub of a tail every day of the brief time we got to share his company.)
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